And Soon the Darkness - 1970

 I went on Wikipedia and read about this film expecting to see a lot about how it was generally considered a hidden gem, but that wasn’t there. Sometimes you really can’t tell. 

Soon as a movie has two bicycling women in France see a man at a cafe and one of them likes him. He follows them as they leave on their ride and pull over for a rest. They get in a fight cause the blond girl wants to go talk to the guy and the brunette wants to keep biking. As soon as she leaves though her blond friend is killed, and not the brunette is wandering around looking for her. 

It’s a small scale simple killer film, where we follow a pretty young female protagonist and there’s a mystery present. I tend to like these and I liked this one too. 

Sure there’s not a lot of intrigue and the characters are all unrealistically written! Sure there’s cops that act like bad guys and war vets who put underwear in their heads! Sure there’s an asshole grocery guy who never gets any explanation and disappears from the movie! But it’s a mystery and it’s compelling. 

Filmed in France the translation is an obstacle which I always like as well in a movie. Feels realistic to my life trying to do shit in Nicaragua and Mexico and stuff when I go. This is no masterpiece but it’s a nice 3 star thriller. 

Candyman 3: Day of the Dead - 1999

 I'm on the hunt for another series I can watch, and I have seen all 3 Candyman movies before but it was a long time ago.  I also saw the remake/legacy sequel thing which was maybe a solid 2.5/5 and I'm not going to rewatch or review.

Candyman 3 brings back Tony Todd as the titular evil guy who appears when you say his name into a mirror 5 times.  Caroline is his distant relative and an artist and he begins to haunt and kill around her once his name is spoken.  He thinks he can use her to bring him back to life, and yeah we go from there.

"After the success of Freddy vs. Jason (2003), Lionsgate wanted to make a horror crossover of their own using the Candyman and the one other lucrative figure they had the rights to at the time: the Leprechaun. When the idea was pitched to Tony Todd, he immediately shot the whole thing down, believing it to be too ridiculous a gimmick to work and disrespectful to a character as tragic as the Candyman." -wikipedia

I mean, given how Candyman 3 here came out, I wish they had made Candyman vs Leprechaun instead.  At least it would've been something new.  

Because it would be wrong to say this movie loses steam: it never has it to begin with.  The main actress is not very compelling and the Tony Todd scenes are the only interesting parts, as well as the bee wrangling.  Vaguely dark quotes go about this little investigation horror thing and basically you just sit there yawning waiting for the eventual Deus ex machina to arrive and defeat the baddies.

It's fine.  Its nothing special.  2 stars.

Irreversible - 2002

 The year?  Likely 2002 maybe 2003.  I had just started working at my first real job, the independent theater Rialto Cinemas Lakeside.  We get a poster for Irreversible show up in the lobby one day.  We never get the movie, or maybe we get it for like a week when I'm not there.  Either way, the poster catches my eye and I'm interested enough to rent it on DVD when it does eventually show up in my local video store, Bae's.

I had the poster on my wall for years.

Renting Irreversible, I didn't know a lot about it.  I try not to watch movie trailers these days, I don't google movies as they're coming out, I'm not on social media, so its easy to avoid opinions and spoilers of things, but still there is not the sense of going in as blind now as there was then when you truly did not know if anyone else ever knew the thing existed.  

I was raped as a kid.  It's the source of a lot of my oddity I guess, and its the reason for my searching the depths of depraved cinema: as a way to confront my trauma and as a way to understand the universality of suffering, and expression of suffering through artwork. This movie is pointedly shoving your nose into the shit that is the awful underneath part of humanity, the violence and the depravity and the wanton destruction which we all know about, some of us experience, and even with this, we still don't really talk about or know how to confront.

The filmmaking in this is next level.  From a 3-4 page script and with a bare minimum of sets, actors, experience, etc, director Gaspar Noe takes us on a largely impulsive frenetic, and backwards, story of a rape revenge.  We follow about 14 long sequences, beginning and then ending, and the next sequence picking up before the last one and ending where the last one began.  We thus see Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his friend Pierre searching for The Tenia, a rapist who raped and beat Marcus's girlfriend (Monica Bellucci).  

There is intense violence and sex in this, including a static 9 minute rape scenes which truly divides audiences.  Every character in this movie is scummy, a evil bastard who is not much better than the disturbing world presented, and yet with the extreme violence and rape near the beginning of the film and how we keep tracking back and back before that what do we see?  We see the beauty, we see the foreshadowing, we see the regularity.  

There is a lot in this film about trauma, about being in the wrong place at the wrong time and about circumstance and happenstance.  There is a lot about the evil in humanity, the fucked up weirdness that is relationships and people's inner selves.  Tagged as misogynistic, homophobic, amateurish, brutal, style over substance and more. Noe continued on to make many amazing films which I'd recommend all of.  And I would truly recommend this movie, which still hits 23 years later.  5 stars.

Sawbones - 1995

 Sawbones starts innocuously enough and I see Adam Baldwin first billed and perk up just a little bit!

Sawbones does indeed have Adam Baldwin as the detective running the show as a dude who tried to be a doctor and got denied goes on a killing spree.  According to what I found, this was a Showtime movie, showing in July or 1995.  If only I'd been there...

It's impressive that stupid, barely written movies can still be elevated by just one good performance and not the worst writing of all time.  Baldwin is a really good actor and his charm is in full effect in this movie, and the dialogue is ok.  Just those two things take this to about 2 stars.

There is also nudity aplenty in this, and the kills....  well, they are there.  They're all the same really.  Performed on the doctors operation table.  The doctor guy has to pretend to be completely nuts and have dialogue with other doctors and assistants, and that's clearly a weak link in the film.

A small twist is the end distinguishes this a little bit from what you might expect.  Otherwise, it's a whatever kinda dumb 80's feeling thriller.

The Eleventh Commandment - 1986

 Okay, was pretty off guessing the year on this one, I guessed much earlier in the 80s.

Maybe it's because 11th here moves pretty slow, or maybe it's just the oddness of it feels a bit more 70s experimental than mid 80s when the slasher was so much more in vogue.  Not sure exactly what it was that made me start this movie on Tubi, but it was sure more of a bizarre psychological flick than anything else.

Early on in this movie, crazy guy and instituted guy Robert escapes from the nut hatch and finds his 8 year old cousin, who he picks up from ballet practice and takes with him on a small killing spree in Los Angeles.  They work their way back to her home where he is going to confront her dad and his uncle, who is a corrupt businessman.

Definitely a very odd movie here.  Tonally uneven?  Sure.  Oddly paced?  You betcha.  Kinda good though?  Sure!  It's a real mixed bag of a sympathetic look at psychopathy and gratuitous violence, with good actor portrayals to really sell it.

 This movie is not like a horror classic by any means but it does at least present some new angles, ideas, and cool stuff.  I give it a solid 3.5

Olivia - 1983

 I have long been watching these weird 80s-90s and even some early 00s indie small horror movies, usually somewhat slasher adjacent.  This sounded like one so I put it on.

Early on in Olivia, little girl Olivia is watching her mom prostitute herself to a guy at their home.  The guy is into some kinky stuff and wants to be verbally degraded while handcuffed to the bed. Things get a little out of hand and the guy gets enraged, breaks the cuffs and beats the woman to death.  Olivia watches and is traumatized for life.  Now as an adult whenever she gets into sexual situations, she sees a vision of her mother who in protective mode urges Olivia to kill!

The most 80's poster ever?

The movie Olivia is small scale and it moves at a somewhat slow late 70s early 80s pace.  It has rampant nudity, just casual stuff of women fully nude walking around pre or post coitus.  This was filmed at Lake Havasu and I sort of wish I'd paid a little more attention to see if I could have determined that myself...  not that I have been there but I love a good challenge.

Directed by Ulli Lommel, this movie is a little bit of a mixed bag in terms of tone and... well, everything else really.  It is okay, but altogether little really happens and it sorta doesn't progress beyond the initial idea.

I will give it 2 stars.

The Cabin in the Woods - 2011

 I think when this movie came out it didn’t do very well, but it pretty much automatically became a cult classic as I remember it. This was written by Buffy creator Joss Whedon and Buffy writer Drew Goddard.

The comedy in Buffy is the type of comedy very much apparent here in cabin in the woods, a movie I’ve seen about four times and I’ve always liked. I showed it to my girlfriend because we’ve been watching horror movies and because I felt like she knew the tropes well enough to understand the jokes in this movie. It’s also nice that this has several Buffy adjacent actors in it and that’s fun to see.

As for the plot, a typical bunch of teens head out to a cabin in the woods for a long weekend. But there’s more: a secret government conspiracy group that has conspired to create a horror movie type situation where the choices that the teens make will feed an evil God. Cannibals, zombies, mermen, Japanese ghosts? Which type of evil will be released?

The thing with this movie and it’s hit me every time, but especially this time, is that it feels like it is much more the horror movie about the teens than it is about the government agency. I really wish that those two were reversed because all of the good comedy and all of the good writing and all of the interesting ideas are with the agency. 

The attempt to have it both ways and create a compelling horror film, as well as a meta commentary on horror and the horror film that we’re watching is not quite even, and overall some of it works and some of it doesn’t. Mostly the actual horror movie is not that good almost by design... And with us getting more of it that sort of presents a problem.

This felt like a minor bit of the Scream syndrome thing, because this came at a time when horror was not good and would not become good again for a little while, and it felt in a way like this was another blow that horror would not recover from. Horror has since covered with indie horror and other stuff but honestly, this kind of meta stuff does really hurt it because of how silly horror can be.

Cabin in the Woods is not a masterpiece and I would say that it hasn’t aged as well either I feel like it was much funnier back in the day. All in all it still has some good jokes and it still lands a few good points and I would give it a 3.5.

Bug - 2006

 I think I saw Bug when it was relatively new, likely on Netflix DVD as it used to be rather than streaming, and I remember liking it and always sorta wanting to revisit it.

This very much slots into the "type of thing I used to seek out" or be into, especially around this time, 2006 being towards the later half of my nihilistic self destructive spiral of releasing emotions through traumatic film or art in general.  If it had people experiencing mass pain and suffering, sign me up.

This was NOT my introduction to Michael Shannon, although it kinda was but news alert, I always forget he plays the guy that Bill Murray buys tickets to Wrestlemania for in Groundhog Day.  The hell?  Anyways, Shannon and Ashley Judd star as a couple people who meet and hit it off early in the film.  She's a alcoholic who's running from her felon ex, he's a quiet weirdo and they have a natural attraction and soon become involved.  That is when he first gives a sign of something wrong, when he begins remarking about tiny bugs he sees in the bed, and then when he begins to see them everywhere.

This is movie about paranoia, obviously, and mental problems.  It is a film depicting clearly paranoid schizophrenia as well as possible drug-addled effects, as they have a meth pipe but are not seen using it.  But more than that it is a film about how deep and how hard empathy is, about how we run from one type of relationship to another of the same kind, about abuse mental and physical.

Directed by William Friedkin, there are incredible shots and tricks evident in this extremely minimal 2 set film.  We have a small hotel room and a bar.  That's it.  One shot in a grocery store.  There are maybe 5 characters in the film.  Given all this, these guys put work into it and the film looks incredible.  There's a specific shot I can recall of a man laying on a bed, ceiling fan above him, and the camera looks at him from behind the blades of the fan.

It's a really disturbing, really challenging movie to watch, and you know, I think it's incredible to see a guy like Friedkin still challenging himself in his 70s with a 4 million dollar indie thriller.  His last film, Killer Joe is awesome as well, and Friedkin was truly one of the greats.  I give this 4.5 stars.

Cemetery Man - 1994

 Also known as Dellamorte Dellamore.

This is a long promised review going back to the beginning of the blog with the Demons series, see the rundown of the series here. Demons was an early pick as to a long running series, and I guess it was finishing Witchcraft that made me think of it.  

Both of these series also sort of represent specific "ends of eras" to me in a way as well: Witchcraft is like the fun 80-90s series which clearly depicts for me when those types of things stopped being fun or at least the type of fun I go looking for.  Then Demons here represents the end of Italian horror, and sort of Italian influence in general?

France and Italy were historically the two most important European regions in cinema.  Just, as a statement, they were.  But what happened to Italy?  One could say technically Benigni and some others are still alive as far as big name known Italian directors, but really, what was the last BIG Italian art film, or even BIG Italian crossover hit?  France continues with directors like Gaspar Noe and Claire Denis.  But not Italy, in a way, Italy lost relevance around the same time Italian horror basically stopped.

Its easy to see why this is called Demons 95 or Demons 7 or whatever.  Michele Soavi is back, as are the living dead, this time coming alive around cemetery man Rupert Everett.  There is a cool depiction of the character of Death, and there are some awesome kills and blood sequences.  So it fits the bill. 

This is perhaps the latest of any Italian horror I've seen, and it is also the last of the classic feeling horror, not leaning into the tropes which would now predominate anything like this.  Its still dialogue and character focused, its still innocent in scope and free of CGI.  There's even nudity!  I liked this a lot, and I give it 4 stars.

Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent - 2004

 Witchcraft 12, this is the end.  I feel like maybe I am not going to return and rank them again.  Refer to the ratings of each individual movie.

Who knew that 12 was where this series jumped the shark and started the whole stepping down of nudity and replacing it with CGI.  Maybe this came earlier and I don't remember?  Anything is possible.

There’s a scene in 12 here where a dude is drinking to forget his sorrows and it’s Seagrams 7 he’s doing shots of. And the more I think of it that’s the perfect analogy of this movie. Like many a bottom shelf selection of “whiskey” Seagrams 7 is actually a “blended spirit” meaning it’s about 70% neutral grain spirit (basically vodka) and 30% whiskey. It’s essentially faking what it is, pretending to be a whiskey to get whiskey cred while secretly being something else  

That’s what these movies are. They’re a bottom shelf cheap thing which will “do the job” barely, technically, but they are for people with no self respect and no class. And you know I was going to say no shade on Seagrams, but fuck it.  Shade. Seagrams 7 sucks.

I’m also rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer right now and it strikes me how much these movies feel like the “monster of the week” random eps from like season 4.  Having a series where a warlock helps detectives fight supernatural crime is a great idea, it’s just that this didn’t work.  It’s too schlocky.

Also, people online seem to not like much beyond about Witchcraft 5.  They dip out for the fun sleazy sexy middle section of these?? They dip OUT?? What the fuck are these for if not sad half-chub stupid fare to drink a beer to and cry that Sheila left you? That’s what these are for?! Right??! No?

Witchcraft 12 is like a slightly better version of 14-16, but when I say slightly I mean by a half a percent.  Spanner helping Lutz and Garner etc etc, nothing new here.

Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death - 2016

 Thus the trilogy begins...and ends, since I am watching these in reverse order.

I just wanted to get in here early as I'm watching to say this is an hour 19 minute movie, 79 minutes, where the opening credits are legitimately 5 minutes of slow moving text over nothing in the background.  I'm going to see where the end credits come in too, cause I bet they're also 5 minutes.  so, an hour and 10 minutes??!

We also have such inconsistency with nudity I would almost thing Tubi censored these.  Except it's clear that Tubi doesn't censor by now, and there is still nudity.  Just so little that its like....  why is there either not more, or none altogether?  Because most of these are BARELY rated R and I always find it weird when movies get the R but don't like, go for it, ya know?

It's shocking to me how boring this trilogy is.  I think I gave 15 a 1.5 and maybe 16 a half star, but really, all of these deserve nothing.  It's a trilogy where absolutely nothing is explained so you would have to have seen Witchcraft already, it kills any of the chemistry between Lutz and Garner, it has awful CGI powers that are NEVER explained and didn't appear before this, and it never once explains what the fuck was going on.  I'm going to give this one zero stars, but they all really deserve it.

White Noise - 2005

 I has been on a long run of 90s thrillers before I stopped writing entries and when I dialed up White Noise I immediately missed those and wanted more. 

Michael Keaton stars in this very if it’s time movie, a movie i remember very clearly coming out and the ads on tv. It has that last grasp of retro tech while later having early cgi. It was a strange transition time for movies. 

Keaton is a happily married man whose wife is pregnant and one day vanishes on a late night car ride home. Keaton begins to hear strange messages around 2:30am and he begins to be followed by a guy who tells him he hears dead people and has heard his wife. When Keaton learns his wife did indeed die he returns to hear what this guy has to say and discovers more than he wanted to know. 

I remember seeing ads like I said and thinking “looks dumb” but honestly this is kinda fine. It has a good build and it movie quickly and there’s genuine emotion and some ok startles. 

The acting is good and everything chugs along into a slightly convoluted end. I would say it’s got some decent stuff going for it. I guess I had low expectations. Also maybe watching awful Witchcraft movies gave me all fucked. I’ll give it like a 3.5

Witchcraft XV: Blood Rose - 2016

 Alright, so I am actually in the trilogy this time.

I'm not going to have a lot to say about this one.  This is the following:

Better than Witchcraft 16,

Worse than most Witchcrafts

Rated R seemingly for a brief flash of nipples and language

Really nothing, like so shallow it barely is even water

And really that's it.  I guess all three of these have a linear story (well, sorta, except for 16 maybe) and probably should've been watched in order but who fucking gives a fuck.  So there's demons and witches or whatever that have taken over a yoga studio and they kill some people and Will Spanner is helping Garner and Lutz blah blah blah.

I'll give it 1.5 stars.